Friday, April 17, 2009

BMW S1000RR to be priced competitively, will take on the Japanese Big Four

With the S1000RR, BMW want to take on the R1, GSX-R1000, ZX-10R and CBR1000RR and the German company will price their bike accordingly...

According to a report on Dealernews, BMW Motorrad USA plans to show the S1000RR superbike in the United States for the first time on Memorial Day weekend at the Miller Motorsports Park World Superbike round. The bike will hit US dealerships by January next year.

Pieter de Waal, Vice President, BMW Motorrad USA, tells Dealernews that BMW intends to position the S1000RR against litre-class superbikes from Japan. ‘We intend to take the four Japanese head-on. We did not intend to build a motorcycle like Ducati does or KTM does. We wanted to build a mainstream motorcycle,’ says de Waal.

‘It’s going to be very different than what people might expect from BMW. It won’t be a 1098 or RC8 kind of price, but much, much closer to where the Japanese are. We’re going right for the fat part of the market with this, and I think it’s going to change a lot of people’s opinions about the brand,’ adds Todd Anderson, head of marketing at BMW Motorrad.

‘For BMW worldwide, we see the USA as the country where our future growth will come from, since Europe is largely saturated. So this is where we think things will happen, and this is where our worldwide focus is at the moment,’ says de Waal, speaking to Guido Ebert of Dealernews.

BMW is also targeting younger buyers with its new lot of bikes. ‘It is critically important for us to get younger people on BMWs. It’s not the fact that the average BMW rider is old – because old people are affluent, and there’s nothing wrong with that – but it is that they are getting older. So you have to bring new blood in. We’ve addressed it with the sport enduro, the new 650 and 800 twin series, and we feel the Superbike must do that in a big way,’ says de Waal.